


You Get What You Take

by scioscribe



Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: Branding, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Missing Scene, Sakaar (Marvel)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-26
Updated: 2018-06-26
Packaged: 2019-05-29 04:02:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,356
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15064739
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: Val's there when the Grandmaster's latest acquisition gets his mark.  Of course, she's had hers for years.





	You Get What You Take

Val’s been in the Grandmaster’s orbit for thousands of years.  She’s drunk his whiskey and his wine, stacked up his credits, and shed her clothes on his ship.  She’s outlasted all comers. She’ll be here long after the rest of them are gone. Sometimes she thinks she’ll be in the Grandmaster’s court long after the world itself is gone--it’ll be just the two of them in a cloud of grit and glitter out among the stars, and she’ll have to decide what to do next.  It’ll kill her head to think that hard after millennia of not thinking at all. Fingers crossed she’ll die first. She’s doing her best.

She doesn’t fuck around anymore with learning the names of his favorites.  They’ve got butterfly life spans, all of them. The Grandmaster likes to own pretty things, but nothing on Sakaar stays pretty for long; the Grandmaster likes novelty, but he hates disagreement.  None of them ever seem to figure that out until it’s too late. Val blinks and they’re gone. So why bother?

But all the same, she notices when the Grandmaster’s latest acquisition gets his mark.

Well, she can hardly help it: she’s there when the Grandmaster talks him into it.

“Honestly,” the Grandmaster is saying, which almost makes Val choke on her drink, “it’s barely more than a sunburn.”

“Thank you, but no.  And I think you may be projecting your rather more robust physical standards on the rest of us, Grandmaster.”

“Oh, now, hey, hey, don’t be so hard on yourself.  I think we can all testify to your, ah, _robustness_.  Or I can, anyway.  Loki, you’re spectacular, that’s what you are.  You’re a _find_.  I just want everyone to know how highly I think of you.  I never have anything that’s not just… top-notch quality.”

Incredibly, this is working for him, because damn her if this year’s flavor doesn’t start to look a little soft-eyed.  “Well, I suppose…”

“There you go,” the Grandmaster says encouragingly.  “That’s the spirit. And think about it--every time I see you, I’ll get to savor it all over again.  I love that. It’s just the _best_ thing.  And I only want the best for _my_ best thing.”

The kiss lingers and then escalates.  Val watches--everything on Sakaar is free, even the porn, and everything on Sakaar costs, especially the porn.  She knows the price she’ll pay for this is the memory of it. What’s-his-name in his tight-fitting leathers going all weak in the knees for a teaspoon of sugar.  And she has other, older memories, ones it’ll take her years to drink away again. She slides one finger under her collar and feels where the burn starts. _Never let anybody put anything on your back_ , she said once, in a time before everything hurt.   _You have to trust them not to do something stupid with you, and I don’t trust you lot at all._  Laughing with her sisters-in-arms as she strode with no hesitation up to the table and laid her arm down. _Make me a Valkyrie_ , she said.

And the woman with the needle said, _You were born a Valkyrie._

She remembers only the barest pain, a kind of scratching.  The adrenaline in her body--it’s finally happening, this is it--drowned out anything else.

The mark on the back of her shoulder is nothing special.  It isn’t the boss’s. No, she chose this one. 142. That’s how many fell in the battle against Hela, the battle only Val survived.  She burned that into her skin and she remembers the pain--so white-hot even through the fog of liquor that she had nearly forgotten how to breathe.

But now she carries them around on her back.  Bears the weight of them on her skin and in her very name, just like she did before.

So later that day when Lackey--that’s not his name unless maybe his parents hated him, but she doesn’t care enough to figure out how she misheard--comes out onto the balcony with his face nearly bleached-out with pain, Val bites into the cork of her bottle, spits it aside, and offers him the whole of it.  She’s not being nice. She’s just been there.

“Here.”

Lackey knocks it back.  He’s not a bad drinker. Not as good as Val, but then again, she’s had so much practice.  “Thank you,” he says, and passes it back to her with maybe a swallow or two left. She doesn’t have enough pride to decline, so she takes it.

“Where’d he put it?” Val says.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”  He’s got that stiff, pasteboard propriety in his voice, like Val hasn’t seen everything he’s got beneath those leathers of his three times over at least.  That’s interesting, then. He defaults to shame when he’s not trying hard enough. He has standards somewhere that he thinks he’s fallen short of. Probably he has--she has to admit he doesn’t look like the kind to surpass them.

She shrugs.  “Suit yourself.”  When she gets a clear look at how he moves, she’ll be able to tell anyway.  She can still sniff out a weakness; she hasn’t forgotten how to kill.

Lackey curls his hands around the balcony railing, looking down at the city.  It’s not much of a view.

He says, “On my upper thigh.”

“That’s as good a place as any.”  She wants another bottle, but she doesn’t want to go back inside, and she has the bizarre idea that if she leaves him here right now, he’ll lean out too far--lean out too far and then keep on leaning.  And she has the even more bizarre idea that this would make some kind of difference to her. “You know, I can count on one hand the number of people over the last decade or so he’s liked well enough to put a brand on, and you got there in, what, two weeks?  Somebody could be impressed by that.”

“And if someone had the audacity to compliment me on my facility for getting myself branded like cattle,” Lackey says, acidic, “I can only imagine how I might react.”

She should just abandon him to his self-pity, but she turns and tugs out the neck of her shirt instead, bearing her own brand to him.  She feels him trace it with one fingertip--his hand is cool rather than warm, like after all this time, he’s come along to counter the fire in her skin.

“That’s what the Grandmaster calls you, isn’t it,” he says.  “Scrapper 142. That’s not much of a name.”

“Neither is Lackey.”  She steps away from his touch and faces him again, impassive, daring him to think she gives a damn what he thinks.

“Loki.”

Now she knows why she doesn’t want it in her head--it’s an Asgardian name.  He’s Aesir. Part-Aesir, anyway, or born on a world they’d tossed from hand to hand.  Either way, it sounds like home.

“I don’t know why I think it matters,” Loki says.  She knows he’s not talking about her not knowing his name--his eyes are down again, surveying the trash heap of their city.  “I can’t take away the pain, more’s the pity, but when I have no more use for it, I can away take the scar. It will heal cleanly.  It’s nothing.”

All of this is nothing, all Sakaar, the two of them included.  Val says, “It hurts,” and Loki nods. He pushes back from the balcony railing, a little more with her now that he’s determined to leave.  He has nice enough eyes, but they’re restless. He’ll keep up with the Grandmaster for a little while but then he’ll be gone like the rest.  His name will go from her memory first, and then the cool touch of his hand, and then the warmth of his mouth on the bottle, and last of all this, this strange provocation to kindness.  In the end, time will take them all, and Val will still be here.

Loki is owned by the Grandmaster; Val is owned by the dead.  She knows which brand will last longer.


End file.
